Director George Tillman Jr ( Notorious) renders both the shooting and Starr’s ensuing grief with an unvarnished rawness. It’s here that The Hate U Give truly impresses with its unflinching power and admirable complexity.
And the lightness of these early moments increases the impact when - as he drives her home from a party - Starr’s childhood friend Khalil (Algee Smith) is shot by a policeman during a traffic stop.
But an able cast (including The Deuce’s Dominique Fishback as Starr’s wayward Garden Heights friend) help keep things bouncing along. There’s a thinkpiece-ready bluntness to these establishing scenes, as they introduce us to Starr’s family, her white boyfriend (KJ Apa) and the subtle prejudice in her white friends’ repeated attempts to be “street”. The film forgoes easy answers about assimilation and the different forms racism can take. Starr Carter ( Amandla Stenberg from, funnily enough, The Hunger Games) is a black teenager who, as her narration tells us, has grown adept at oscillating between two selves the street-smart character she shows her black friends in her Garden Heights neighbourhood and the peppy, meek girl she plays for the benefit of white private school pals who won’t accept her if she acts “too ghetto”. And it only serves to amplify the effect of a genuinely dark, stunningly bold and utterly vital look at race relations in modern America.īased on US first-time author Angie Thomas’s 2017 bestseller (which, in a nod to the urgency of its themes, has gone from page to screen in just over 18 months), the core story is an impressively deft melding of the personal and the political. There’s no such protective distance in The Hate U Give. But, generally, these stories play out in speculative sci-fi futures or worlds touched by fantasy and magic. Historically, Young Adult blockbuster successes have been famed for the unexpected darkness of their subject matter, whether it’s the dystopian ritual slaughter of The Hunger Games or the, um, dystopian ritual slaughter of The Maze Runner.
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